I ditched school on Monday. Mom chalked it up to my busy weekend, and the way she said it, I knew no one had told her what had really happened. “You don’t have a fever,” she said. “But you do look a little peaked. Too much excitement.”
She was in a flurry after getting back from her trip, because she’d gotten an interview somewhere she said had a female hiring manager, which she hoped might mean a better shot at getting the job. The interview wasn’t until Thursday, but she’d laid out her outfit already—the briefcase, the shoes—and while she vacuumed before leaving for work, I heard her reciting answers, or parts of them. “My strengths: staying calm, pressure, resourcefulness, attitude.” I hoped more than anything she didn’t have to hear about the wedding until after the interview.
Tina called and I pushed my pseudo-symptoms. “My throat really hurts,” I said. “I’ve been throwing up.” I wasn’t sure those things were consistent with any particular disease, but she didn’t press me. She also didn’t ask about the wedding, which I thought meant maybe Candace had told her what had happened and Tina was giving me the choice to tell her. But I didn’t want to. Not right then, anyway.
I still didn’t go back on Tuesday. For Mom, I feigned worsening cramps and a headache. She sat with me on the couch in the morning before she left for work and we watched Bozo’s Circus Show. Some kid cried when he missed the last bucket, and Bozo comforted him with a shoulder pat that made the kid cry harder.
After Mom had left for the day, telling me there were Lipton soup packets in the pantry and aspirin in the bathroom, I alternated the first few hours lying in my bed or on the couch, staring blankly at the ceiling or the TV, imagining what would happen if I did go back to school. I couldn’t look at Bobby again, that was for sure. But I wasn’t nearly as sure of anything else.
Why had I said Bobby’s name in the closet? Was I really afraid of a real relationship? God, did I have any idea what I even wanted at all? Maybe I’d been fooling myself about everything, from playing soccer to thinking about college.
Tina called from a school pay phone that afternoon. I was sprawled on the floor of Mom’s room, painting my toenails. I had two toes with busted purpled nails from soccer, but the three coats of red I’d used were hiding them nicely. “What’s going on?” she asked. “You never miss two days in a row.”
“Cramps, horrible ones,” I lied.
“Mmm-hmm,” she said. “And yesterday you were throwing up, with a sore throat. When do you think these cramps will subside? Everyone was looking for you at practice yesterday. Bobby seemed really concerned, too.”
Telling her that I wasn’t ever coming back to practice seemed like something she deserved to hear in person. And, ugh, did I have to tell the whole team, because I was the captain? The title felt like a booby prize, a concession you gave someone too stupid to realize it meant nothing, like the cases of Rice-A-Roni they gave to the loser on a game show. For a second, you thought at least you’d gotten something, until you had to lug twenty pounds of rice to the airport. If I wasn’t captain, I could just stop showing up.
“I’ll be back soon,” I said.
I guess that wasn’t enough for Tina, though, because she showed up at my house that day after practice. The doorbell rang, nearly startling me off the couch, from which I hadn’t moved in several hours. I ignored it for the first buzz, but it kept ringing and ringing so I couldn’t hear Family Feud. I dragged myself to the door, figuring that if it was someone selling something, at least the hour of boredom I’d spent curling my hair that morning could be appreciated. (I thought I looked like a brunette Judith Light on One Life to Live, but I might have been delusional from my TV fog.) Before I’d opened it all the way, Tina stepped inside.
“I know you’re not sick,” she said. She set down my equipment bag on the floor. “I told Bobby I’d give this to you. It was in his car.”
“Thanks,” I said, thinking maybe I’d throw it away later. Tina was studying my hair. She pointed at me like she’d figured something out. “Are you sneaking out somewhere? Candace told me you guys had a fight, and something went wrong with that Joe guy.”
Wordlessly, I led her to the kitchen and she followed me. “Okay, you’re starting to scare me,” she said.
I opened a can of Cheez Balls, set it on the table, and got us two bottles of soda from the fridge. I sat. She sat. We each ate a Cheez Ball.
“Do you have anything else to eat? I’m starving. Practice was rough,” she said. I wondered what they’d learned. Bobby had promised to work with us more on improving our fakes, which he was probably good at, because he was one.
I pulled lunch meat and cheese from the fridge and set it in front of Tina and opened my bottle of RC. “I’m done with soccer,” I said finally, like I thought this would go down easier with the food. “It’s stupid. We can’t even get a game.”
Straying from the real reason was shitty of me, but as I said it, I thought maybe it could be true. Hadn’t this whole thing really only been an experiment to see what could happen with Bobby? I’d learned that. I’d screwed up a real thing with Joe for an imagined thing with Bobby.
“Bullshit,” Tina said, flicking a Cheez Ball at my hair. It stuck to one of my sprayed curls. I plucked it out and ate it. “What happened at the wedding?”
“Me. I happened. I . . . called Joe ‘Bobby’ at the exact worst time, because I’m an idiot, and that didn’t go over well at all.”
“Poor Joe—that had to mess with his ego,” Tina said. “But you can fix that, can’t you?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. I haven’t talked to him.”
“Well, first things first. You should try,” she said. “But what does it all have to do with Bobby and soccer?”
“I don’t want to play for him anymore.” I liked the way the words stuck in the air, their finality. I had never been sure about what I wanted, but it was nice to know what I didn’t want.
“But do you want to play soccer?” Tina said, taking a big bite of her sandwich. I was almost jealous because the hunger after practice was so much more gratifying to satisfy than the hunger after sitting around all day and curling my hair was.
I thought about the field, and the feeling when I ran, and the surge in my chest when I managed to knee the ball—a new trick—and kick it off the top of my foot like it was something I was born doing and not something I’d only recently learned. I thought of what Joe had said about sports, how they got you to do ridiculous stuff but that was sort of the point. I sure as hell wanted to play soccer. Goddamn it. I wanted to not want to.
“Yeah, I wanna play. I miss you guys,” I said. “But I don’t want to play for him. He’s . . . not who I thought he was.”
“So? What does he have to do with it?” she said. There was no escaping her penetrating stare. I squirmed.
“He’s the coach.” I wouldn’t meet her eyes as I rolled a piece of bologna and bit it.
Tina got her impatient look, like I was being intentionally dense and she was annoyed to have to exert herself to enlighten me. “I don’t know what went down and you’re obviously not going to tell me,” she said. “But who cares if he’s not who you thought he would be? I love driving, and you didn’t see me not getting my license because the DMV sent me out with a tester who called me princess and asked if I knew which one was the brake. I hated that guy. I wanted to open the passenger door and push him out, I was so angry. But I wanted to drive more. I think you like soccer enough that even if a mouthbreather like Paul Mahoney was coaching, you’d want to play.”
“That happened to you at the DMV?”
“That’s not the point,” she said.
“I think I’d rather play for Paul Mahoney than Bobby.”
“I won’t even entertain that idea. I saw him reach down into his pants to adjust himself today and then put that same hand into a bag of chips.” Tina winced at the memory. “But you’re obviously going to be stubborn. And I mostly wanted to deliver your equipment bag as an excuse to talk about something else.”
“Something else sounds great.” I chided myself for not asking Tina right away what was going on with her. “What’s up?”
“So you know how Todd has to be covert when he calls my house?”
I nodded.
“Well, he flubbed. He said he was Victor, my chem lab partner, but I took chemistry last year . . .”
“Uh-oh.”
“Yep.” Tina traced the opening of her soda bottle with her fingertip as she stared at our ugly yellow-and-brown wallpaper. “And my mom point-blank said, ‘Who is this, really?’ And Todd said Todd Lindholm, because he didn’t want to lie anymore.”
“So now what?”
“Well, now I have to be home by six thirty every night.” She glanced at the clock. “And no phone until I tell my parents what’s going on.”
“Have you talked to Todd?”
She nodded. “I called him after practice, from the pay phones. And I think he doesn’t understand why I won’t just own up to it. I don’t understand, either.”
I thought of the way Tina’s house was filled with photos of her, scrapbooks devoted to every certificate and achievement award she’d ever received. How her mom had even sent away for a college brochure from Oxford University in England, “just in case.”
“Maybe you know that once you tell them, it’ll change the story they have written for you,” I said, thinking of Bobby and the story I had made up for him.
“I think I’m most scared because what if my mom is right? I want a lot of the same stuff for me that she does, and what if it turns out Todd won’t fit in with my plans?”
We’d finished the Cheez Balls. I wished we hadn’t. I needed one. “Maybe he won’t. But so far, he does, and he supports you. Plus, you love him. Whatever you decide you want to do with your life, don’t you want to do it for the real you?”
Tina wrinkled her nose at me and stared at my face with skepticism, like she was accusing it of saying the wrong thing.
“You’re annoyingly right.” She flicked me on the arm.
“I know.” I flicked her back. Even if I wouldn’t have soccer, or Joe, and might have lost Candace, I still had Tina, and being able to give her good advice made me hopeful that I wouldn’t screw that up, too.
“I might have to ease my way into telling them,” Tina said.
“If you don’t kick the ball when you can, you’ll never know if you made the shot.”
“Look at you, with your soccer metaphors.” Tina looked satisfied. “You’ll be back on the team.”
“Yeah, if Bobby’s gone, I’ll come back,” I said.
“You better tell me if he’s a serial killer.”
“He’s not,” I said. “Take a shower before you talk to your mom. You smell.”
Tina smirked. “Okay, and you enjoy your fake-ass cramps.”
I thought all night about what Tina had said, but I still couldn’t see the point of playing. I had existed before soccer, and I didn’t need it to survive. It wasn’t a boyfriend like Todd who felt like a soul mate. I’d used soccer to get close to Bobby and kept playing because I thought he saw something special in me. But he was a liar. I didn’t have potential. I wasn’t going to get a scholarship. There was never anything special between us, and there never would be. I hated the girl who thought that. She was stupid, and I didn’t want to be reminded of her.
Still, all night I dreamed of playing.
I woke up Wednesday, the day Mom went in to work early so she could make it to her night class, wondering if I should go to school. It was also November 7, a date I remembered as Bobby’s birthday from Dana’s early reconnaissance on him. I wished him an awful one. Part of me wanted to go to school just so I could ignore him if I saw him.
The phone rang. I checked the clock: seven thirty. I wondered if it was Tina.
I tried to sound deathly ill when I answered. “Hello?” I croaked.
“Hello. May I speak to Susan Klintock, please?”
His voice was unmistakable. I started to hang up.
“Wait,” he said. “Susan?”
“Yeah.” Whatever, Bobby, I thought. Did you get older and wiser today, or are you still going to fuck Jacqueline for money tonight?
“Look . . .” I heard voices behind him, and he was almost whispering. He must have been in the athletic office already.
“I saw,” I said harshly.
He ignored my remark, or maybe let it sink in. I could see him in his algebra teacher clothes, hunched toward the phone in the corner of his desk. “I know that situation was . . . strange,” he said. “But the team’s wondering about you. And so am I.”
Hearing him still had an effect on me; the slight rumble underneath his voice, especially over the phone like this, made me shiver. I knew I could never see him again or I’d have to fight off the attraction that I wanted not to feel.
I needed to end this, cut it cleanly, the way a smoker who wanted to quit had to flush cigarettes down the toilet because she was afraid the trash can wasn’t going far enough. “You can tell them that I’m done.”
I hung up. I stood next to the phone, staring at it, wondering if he’d call again, wondering if I could keep my resolve. But nothing happened.
Finally, I picked it up and dialed the attendance office. I tried not to cry as I pretended to be my mom and said, “Susan Klintock won’t be at school today.”